


Icing on the Cake

by tvsn



Series: H+S [6]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-10-25 10:11:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10762128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvsn/pseuds/tvsn
Summary: Anna and Edmund have a sordid history of helping their children with grade school science projects.





	1. The Sweets

**Author's Note:**

> This is the odd, fluffy one off I feel compelled to produce once a year or so. Though set in the H+S universe, it takes place so far in the future that I really hesitate to say it anything to do with that narrative. Still, there are a few loose ‘spoilers’, all of which have been vaguely alluded to in the main text.
> 
> I’d normally fill this space with potential trigger warnings, but then I normally write about immigrant friendships under the strain of suicidal tendencies, missing corpses, Wall Street corruption and prescription drug abuse. 
> 
> This is domestic fluff. With cake and calculus.

Anna Hewlett sighed as she struggled to shake the house key out of the door it had just unlocked, her arms weighed down by bags containing empty calories of the sort she normally would not allow in her household. She glanced down at her daughter, wondering if she too was secretly salivating at the prospect of candy-coated chocolates and cake mix. She was met, however, with a wide-eyed, fearful stare. Halley shifted where she stood, struggling with her own sacks stuffed with more sweets than could possibly fill the night shy. Anna’s selfish smile faded. She bent down to kiss the top of her daughter’s head.

“Mummy,” Halley started, now seeming to worry that the straight dark hair she had inherited from her father had lost its easy order. Anna dropped her keys into one of the canvas totes and smoothed out the locks Halley imagined to be displaced. The girl gave a weak grin before returning her attention to the bagged battel they needed to unpack.

The line at the grocer’s had set them back by forty minutes. As it stood, the two only had an hour with which to carry out covert operations before her father came home. Anna regretted ranting in traffic about how the last model solar system had turned out – no doubt – she realised, an echo of the girl’s teacher.

“It will be okay,” she forced a smile. “I’ll ring Daddy about five minutes before he leaves the office and ask him if he can pick up a pizza for dinner. He’ll hit traffic on his way out of the city,” she winked. “Not that we will be hungry by the time he gets here,” she laughed. “Did I ever tell you about the time I built a model Milky Way with your grandma? We ended up eating half the stars in the sky. I had a stomach-ache for days. It was glorious. This will be fun, I promise. It is a rite of passage.”

“Sure,” Halley said, sounding anything but.

 _“I still like the horse one best,”_ they heard a familiar voice taunt.

 _“Why did you use that picture of me? Why did you even print it? I am making a dumb face,”_ Anna’s fifteen-year-old son protested.

 _“You ever consider that you just_ have _a dumb face and there is nothing I can do for it? I like it.”_

_“My face or your poster?”_

_“The latter … obviously.”_

“Maybe we should build it on the kitchen counter,” her daughter murmured, hearing her brother laughing from within the dining room with one of his friends. Anna wrinkled her brow.

“Do you know what he is up to?”

“Does it matter? You know how he gets when _she’s_ around,” there was something almost bitter in her daughter’s tone.

Anna sighed. It had been a recent development. She nodded at her fifth-grader and stormed from the atrium, breaking up the snickers and slights with a shout.

“Jordan, whatever you guys are doing, I need you to take it upstairs – _door open!_ ” she added, wondered and worried that he had reached a point in his upbringing that necessitated an open threat. “Your sister and I need the table. We have work to do.”

Anna plopped her last minute purchases down a top paperboard and cutouts, causing what she hoped was not glitter to scatter everywhere. If her friend Mary - who had once washed a crime scene of every spec of evidence - could not combat the substance once it, in her words, _‘infested and began to multiply’_ Anna knew she would not stand a chance. Rather than addressing her son further, she looked at Mary’s eldest daughter helplessly for an explanation; hoping, rather, for an apology followed by an offer of assistance in sorting the strewn sparkles. The uncommonly tall girl rose from her chair in greeting - unblinking, unsmiling. Suddenly self-conscious of her slightly awkward stance, she tucked her long neck into her shoulders as to appear as unassuming as possible.

“Good evening, Mayor Hewlett,” she said. “This probably isn’t what you want to hear from me right now but I sort of need a favour,” she said as she reached for her school bag, producing an all-too-familiar yellow community service slip. Anna frowned, hoping her son, less inclined to be direct, was not readying himself to follow suit. “It is only two hours,” the girl began again, as though it made a difference. “You have anything for me to do at town hall sometime _before_ my match on Saturday?” she asked.

Anna looked at the mess of red glitter that has found their way into the rug, a family heirloom imported from her husband’s ancestral estate. “I may have something here,” she sighed. She reconsidered. Of Mary’s six children, Jeanne was the least likely to otherwise engage in arts-and-crafts. “Really Junior?” she asked as she read the slip, using the girl’s hated nickname as practically everyone in Setauket did. She felt Halley nudge her as she watched Jeanne’s face falter. A silent chastisement. If there was a rule, Anna was proud that her sweet daughter seemed to be the exception to it.

“Mummy please!” she heard her daughter hiss at the same time Jeanne started with, “It’s not what you think -”

She spoke in a tone that so echoed her father’s as to tell Anna that the situation matched the one her gym teacher and the lunch lady had laid out perfectly. Jordan, for his part, choked on a chuckle, cementing her suspicions. Anna looked down at the sugary substances she needed to unpack and assemble. She did not have time for their nonsense. She surrendered to its madness.

“Just help me clean this – whatever this is – up, and -”

“Can … c’mon, Mum,” her son cut her off. “I’m rather busy right now. What do you need the table for?”

“What … do _you_ need it for?” Anna stammered, caught off guard by a deepening voice that further served as a reminder that Edmund would soon be starting his drive back from the city unless she quickly interfered. “I swear Jordan if you also have a project that you waited until the last minute -”

Before she could finish her son perked up. He stretched his small frame over the mess he’d created and puckered at his sister.

“Oooooh,” he taunted. Halley stuck out her tongue before responding in a voice she was unaccustomed to raising that this was all his fault. If he had not made his own solar system project into such a historic disaster she would not have been forced to wait to do hers until their father would not have enough time to interfere. At this outburst the two teenager’s faces brightened before breaking into laugher at the memory of something they simultaneously decided Jordan really out to campaign on.

 - _‘Make the Classroom Great Again!’ ‘Astrophysics First!’-_

“Do you still have a picture of Mrs. Snyder with cake on her face?” Jeanne asked, half-immune to the Hewlett family history of sullying the elementary school science curriculum.

“I know I can if Halley does _\- exactly -_ as I say,” Jordan answered, unbothered by it.

“I’m glad you are running unopposed,” Anna interrupted, unamused. “Is that what this is meant to be? Campaign posters?” She looked down at pictures of her son’s face glued atop famous portraits of European strong-men – Napoleon on his Russian campaign, Putin, shirtless, having just killed wild game with his bare hands – deciding this was defiantly going to require A Conversation. Anna was, however, lost for what it might entail. She became glad at the fact that fate had handed her an important parenting moment the moment she needed one to delegate to her husband at the same time she began to fear that Edmund might be a tad too sympathetic to her son’s humour and politics. Still, it might provide the distraction she was going to need tonight.

Jordan gave her a quick glance as if to indicate his ability to sustain against the siege he knew her to be plotting.

“Little sister,” he said, “rather than live in the shadow of my sins, why not strive to replicate them?” Jordan smiled, ignoring his mother; as he was want to do as of recent. Anna wondered if Mary saw the same problems with her own teenager but doubted it based only on her friend's daughter’s movements. The girl, who had been born on the same December night as her son, obediently began to pack the art supplies neatly aside without waiting for the order as she offered Anna and Halley a weak smile.

“Mrs. Snyder hated me because of your brother too,” she winked. “You are in good company.”

“Mrs. Snyder hated me too, twenty years before your brother was even born,” Anna recollected almost fondly.

She thought of the woman who had made her miserable at ten on the day her son turned in the project he and his father had spent weeks constructing. It had been, admittedly, every bit as much her fault as it had been Edmund’s that the contraption they had built in the garage resulted in cake being fired in the old bat’s face. Anna had insisted that regardless of how accurate the model was, it would not receive a passing grade unless it was edible. This, she had informed them both, was a proud tradition of an American education. Jordan, panicked, had put store-bought cake pops of various size on wires not meant to hold their weight before turning it in. They all seemed to have hit their unintended target when he had switched it on to demonstrate orbit, ruining his teacher’s makeup and a pastel pantsuit that Anna decided at the time ought to have been given to Goodwill at some point in the previous century. She remembered her beloved husband’s defence of the boy afterwards, which had transformed into a personal crusade against the elementary school science curriculum by the time he had hung up the phone.

It had been no use, as time stood to testify.

Their daughter was still being made to include Pluto as a planet five years later, nearly twenty after its status had been revoked.

Anna decided upon seeing the assignment slip that had to protect Edmund every bit as much as she had to protect his namesake-of-sorts.

“Oh yeah, she hated you too. Just rob me of my glory, Mum,” Jordan rolled his eyes. Addressing the room again with a passion learned from hours of watching otherwise dull rhetoric on C-SPAN he continued, “That was an act of God through machinery rarely seen since His being otherwise engineered out of the inventive process.”

“A literal deus ex machina,” his best friend agreed, smiling before Jordan argued that the preposition spoiled the pun.

“Good times,” Anna agreed, shaking her head. She glanced down at her daughter and her expression changed. The girl’s dark, pleading eyes told of a woman still sour over an artillery of sweets. Halley was quiet, kind, and had never found herself in conflict with anyone until a computer sorted her into a classroom under the whims of an authoritarian who hated her family name. She didn’t deserve this, however much, Anna maintained, old Mrs. Snyder might. Anna nodded at the tenth-graders, interrupting their fond recollections of the days when their student files had first begun to fill with needless acts of rebellion. “Good times,” she repeated, “but now, I fear, we need the table. Can you take your rise to fascism upstairs?”

Jordan crossed his arms. His smile collapsed and his voice filled with chill. “I could, I suppose, but you’ve already disincentivize me to do so. Halley,” he started, redirecting his attention to his sister. He lifted his strong jaw slightly, nudging his chin in her direction, “the _only_ time Dad and I had anything resembling a bonding experience was when he got all into building a model solar system with me and got to explain the universe and the mythology behind some of the nomenclature without me falling asleep on him. You know you and I were almost named after constellations?”

Jeanne covered her face as she broke out into laughter.

“No you weren’t,” Anna interjected quickly. “Stop telling people that.” Her son had been named after his godfather, her decision; Edmund had been allowed no voice or input after he had been forced by his own poor decision making to abandon her throughout her first trimester. Years later, she had happily agreed to Halley, thinking it sounded rather American for her very British husband to suggest until talk of a comet years after the fact told her she had been deceived.

“Do you know how _cool_ that would have been though?” Jordan countered. “Look Sis, I know it is not the same for the two of you but it was the only time Dad actually seemed to like _me_ at all and it would, truly, break my heart if -”

“That is far from true!” Anna put in, “Your father loves you both equally -”

“Yeah that well may be, but the man certainly plays favourites. Anyway, what is up with this, Mum? You want to rob Dad of the experience of sharing his passions with his daughter, or you want to rob my sister of all the star stuff that you always say made you fall in love with our father in the first place? No,” he declared. “I won’t stand for it. In fact, I won’t stand at all. I’m staging a sit-in until Dad comes home. C’mon Junior, let’s finish our March on Rome.”

Anna’s heart broke at her son’s argument. So she had to fix this, too. She felt her hand tense around the slip she had not yet agreed to sign. “Jeanne,” she began tactfully, “you don’t happen to know your mother’s lemon cake recipe do you? I know it is rather time-intensive, but if you help me with it and promise not to speak a word of this to anyone – your mom especially, lest she have something else to lord over me – I’ll sign off that you organized some flyers or whatever it is that your school wants you to do in pentene.”

Jeanne blinked for a moment between the three cross-armed Hewletts, deciding on which side of the divide she’d ought to place her loyalties.

“Sure, I mean that would be splendid … to get it all out of the way before school tomorrow,” she seemed to apologize to her buddy-since-birth. “It really does take two hours though. I doubt we will finish before -”

“I know we won’t. We will order pizza. Make a fun night of the whole thing.”

Her two children both rose in protest at the implication. Halley, because she was worried about her grade, Jordan, because he and Jeanne apparently had not finished their homework yet.

Anna ignored them both. She looked at the time on her lock screen, ready, though already half-regretting, the call she was about to make.

Her husband answered on the second ring.

 

* * *

 

“So what my mum and I did for the larger planets was,” Jeanne tried to demonstrate by unwrapping a Lindt, which Anna promptly took and put into her mouth.

The teen shot her a small glare, swallowed something fictive and far less sweet and continued in a proud, high tone - this time only to Halley, “We - _meaning you and I_ \- will take a round praline to form the core. Then we shall bake two small cakes by filling two bowls half way with mix and putting them in the oven at three-hundred-degrees for about fifteen minutes. While they are still hot, we can scoop out the centre and filled it with caramel – for the magma, which sound science-y enough for Dr Hewlett but also works for making sure the two haves stick together. Before you conjoin them, put a prop stick through the praline and stick it in the middle of the … contraption. The whole thing will need to cool for about an hour before you can cover it with baking chocolate and then that will need to be chilled in the refrigerator until it is solid. Twenty minutes or so. Then you can decorate it with icing and candy. Easy.”

Halley, who was sitting on the counter beside where Jeanne was working, still mixing the batter for the lemon meringue sun the daughter of Setauket’s resident goddess of home and hearth had explained with equal confidence and ease, shifted “That doesn’t sound easy.”

“Okay ‘easy’ … probably not, but it is fun.”

“It is weird to see you like this ... so flawlessly domestic. Ah, domesticated at all, really,” Jordan commented without looking up from the Calculus homework Anna knew him to be copying. Jeanne, still wearing Soffe cheer-shorts with her school logo and a faded band tee from gym, had a way of looking feral even when she was in evening formal. Her copper hair had faded into fire red in the summer sun that had bronzed her legs but covered her face in freckles. Long and lanky, she was at an age where different was deemed ugly. Anna, who had also shot up to 5’10 the summer before her sophomore year of high school, who -twenty odd years later- continued to have straight irons broken by her equally unruly hair, could still sympathise with the pain she saw shoot across the girl’s face.

Tactfully, she asked if it was safe to put a bowl in the microwave for so long before the words she knew her son had not intended to hurt were allowed to fester.

“The oven! The oven Mrs. Hewlett!” The pupils of Jeanne’s pale eyes contracted as her jaw fell in horror.

Anna smiled.

“See? This is why I don’t want you to talk to your mother about these kinds of things,” she claimed. “I would be too embarrassed the next time I show up at a church picnic with something purchased and packaged.”

“No offence, Mum, but the whole town knows baking is not your strength,” her daughter said.

“Full offence Halley, diplomacy isn’t yours. You asked me for my help and _this_ is your thanks?” Anna joked.

Halley frowned, “You called dad and told him what we were doing. The one thing I begged you not to do. Now Jeanne has to stay and teach us baking so he won’t be tempted to build anything.”

“Oh, don’t make this about me,” Jeanne interjected. “I’d stay anyway. One, there is no _way_ I would miss a chance to witness your father freaking out over astronomy first hand, two I can’t go home and face mine tonight. Just can’t.”

“What happened at school anyway?” Halley asked.

“Fucking legend!” Jordan declared, seconds before Anna - in full frustration- shouted “Language!”

“It is okay. People curse in my year too,” her daughter muttered.

“Yes Pet, but you shan’t be one of them. And neither will your brother. I do not pay for you to take SAT prep every weekend for you to employ such course vocabulary,” she heard herself hiss. Jordan’s face painfully twisted the features he had not quite yet grown into something half way between apologetic and embarrassed. The room was quiet.

Anna’s outburst seemed to linger, to echo.

She remembered the ideas she had prior to motherhood.

She remembered her carefree assumption that Edmund would wind up the authoritarian figure in their children’s lives.

How wrong fate seemed set on proving her.

“So I pulled Ashley Kempton’s weave out in P.E.,” Jeanne spoke in complete nonchalance, scattering a discomforting silence with a disconcerting statement. Halley’s eyes widened in anticipation, Jordan’s in excited and possibly displaced pride. Anna felt hers narrow as she wondered if such a fete was easily attained.

“You _scalped_ her,” Jordan amended. “It was brilliant. Had her down on the ground in seconds and gave a lecture on social etiquette whilst you were fighting  - without once raising your voice at that. You’re Tumblr-famous now, by the way,” he claimed, handing over his mobile as evidence.

“Oh God!” Jeanne scoffed, “And here I thought not starting on Saturday was the worst of my problems.” She handed the phone to Halley who had set aside her mixing bowl and whisk to reach for it. Jeanne covered her face in shame.

“Pretty sure your old man is just going to ask you if you hit first and hit hard and then high five you for having done so.”

“Pretty sure you have never seen my dad angry,” she said, glaring through a slit in her fingers.

They were both right, Anna conceded internally. “And I am one-hundred-percent certain that you kids shouldn’t put everything online,” she scolded. “Junior, this could result in a lawsuit! What on earth in wrong with your generation?”

She opened her mouth but it was Jordan’s words that filled the air.

“Jeez Mum. Junior couldn’t have made the original video as she half-stared in it and she certainly didn’t have time to make a gif set for a site she doesn’t even use. Don’t look at me either. After Ms. Hartwell from the lunch line was called in to break it up because we don’t have any female gym teachers, Junior and Ashley and a few other people who were involved were brought into the principal’s and I waited there outside -as support- until the block ended. Ashley _started_ the whole thing and was suspended for two days and Junior got off almost scot-free except Coach Williams told her that he won’t start her on Saturday due to her behaviour. It works out in her favour that the video exists, politically speaking.”

“It won’t work,” Jeanne stated bluntly.

Anna fixated on the word ‘political’. “For the love of God, Jordan, tell me you aren’t trying to make this a part of your presidential run. Why are you doing this? You are running unopposed! If you keep this up -”

“I wasn’t planning on it but now that you mention it, it _is_ a rather good idea. But look, all I meant was that everyone at school wanted to see Ashley get what was coming to her so it stands to reason that everyone at school is going to want to go to the girls’ varsity soccer match on Saturday specifically to cheer Jeanne on. I just have to convince Coach of this before Mr. Simcoe finds out and forbids Jeanne from going to Homecoming.”

“Even if he does, it won’t change my answer or anything else,” Jeanne spat.

Anna’s eyes darted between them, wondering how much of their situation she had misinterpreted, wondering if they fully understood it themselves.

 

* * *

 

Halley hopped off the counter when she heard a car pulling into the driveway. Jordan went back to scribbling down as many answers as he could before his father’s presence would promise him shame. Jeanne returned to pouring batter into the moulds.

Anna listened as the door unlocked. She closed her eyes and counted. The sun, Mercury, Venus, Neptune and Pluto were finished. Saturn and Jupiter were ready to enter the oven. She had personally eaten half a bag of gummy bears, a handful of M+Ms, an overpriced Swiss praline and a Hershey bar she’d thrown into the wagon at checkout out of habit. She could afford to consume around two bites of pizza if she was willing to ignore the number on her bathroom scale tomorrow morning. Halley had been too nervous, too concentrated to eat much of anything; her brother and his friend too disciplined. Anna wondered where she had failed them. Elementary school science projects were supposed to be fun; so too, she reasoned, were high school student body elections, even if there was no real need to campaign for office. Her children both looked miserable.

Anna felt worse than she suspected either of them knew.

She felt a light kiss grace her cheek. For a moment, her husband’s mere presence stole her away from her stress and scrutiny. She smiled.

Edmund gasped as his daughter flung herself at his waist, struggling to balance three boxes of pizza as he moved to embrace the child. Anna took them from him, laughing that he still clearly underestimated her sweet tooth.

“Ah, no, no, Darling,” he corrected as he lifted Halley from the ground. “I’ve been living amongst Americans long enough to know that you have a societal inclination towards eating cold pizza as breakfast. I provide where I can,” he winked. He greeted the other two children, commented on the state of the kitchen and inquired as to how they were and how far along they were with the project, feigning disappointment when he was given an answer in units far smaller than billions of years.

“Eddie,” Anna said as she kissed his cheek. “I am having second thoughts about sending the children to public school.”

“Are they still teaching Pluto as a planet?” he asked, half-knowing the answer, half-afraid to hear it spoken.

“Not only.”

Anna explained Jordan’s campaign, which he defended as showing student politics for the sham that clearly was. She told him about Jeanne’s fight, which Jordan explained had to do with Ashley insulting a trans-girl within earshot, and this days after she made fun of Sam and Nate for having two dads. After agreeing that the girl sounded horrible and consenting that she, too, would have likely picked such a fight at fifteen, Anna was ready to drop the matter. That was, until Jordan started in with talk about how he now planned not only to be SHS’s president, but to have Jeanne lead his armies into other schools within the district and help him liberate them from tyranny, thereby creating a Pan-Setauket Republic, knowing, he laughed, what his oldest friend was capable of.

Jeanne said nothing.

Unfortunately for father and son both, Edmund found this idea splendid and hilarious, even after Anna stated that she had every reason to believe their child was earnest in his proposal.

“Well, that is how you tame a colony,” Edmund smiled. Anna shook her head.

“Why don’t you go have a look at the state of his campaign? It is all over the dining room table. Jordan refused to clean it up before you got home and I am terrified of touching glitter.”

“Glitter?” Edmund clarified. He gave his son a hard look.

“In my defence, Dad, I was demanding that you get to take part in Halley’s school project. I … well I ah, I wouldn’t have learned anything about outer space if not for you and I thought my sister could benefit,” he sounded sincere, almost apologetic.

Edmund looked like he might smile; he looked like he might weep. He looked at his child as though the world ceased to spin. “I never … I never knew it meant that much to you,” he softly stammered.

“Yeah well, you never offered to help me again. After I failed that project in the fifth grade. Never.”

“Anything … anything either of you need I’d, that is to say it would be my honour, my -”

“Your son has a C in Pre Calc Dr H,” Jeanne announced. “He is probably too proud to say anything.”

“Ooooooh,” Halley taunted - an echo of her brother earlier. Anna told her to help her with the plates.

“Is that true?” Edmund asked, frowning.

“Well yeah, I mean,” Jordan winced, “but it is still early in the semester, we haven’t even had our first test yet.”

“Good, that is … well that is fortunate, at the very least. Why don’t we sit down this weekend, you and I, and devise a … better solution than copying answers to homework,” Edmund said as he glanced down at the table.

“Ah -”

“Splendid, because I’ve otherwise nothing going on and you are grounded until your mother says otherwise. Noble as your reasons may have been for refusing to do as your mother told you, I simply will not tolerate disrespect in this household. Am I understood?”

“But -”

“Hm?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wonderful," he continued cheerfully. "Now why don’t you go clear the table that your sister can set it? I’ve heard we have to eat quickly tonight so that we can finish constructing a solar system.”

He smiled at his wife, she returned it.


	2. The Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone was wondering with regard to the notes left at the end of the previous chapter, Bayern did, in fact, win the Bundesliga a month ago when last I updated. Oops. Sorry it took me so long to finish.
> 
> That said, on the off chance that any of you are reading this around the time of publication and (like myself) are meant to be fasting, this is arguably NSFR.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Anna Hewlett loved her husband. She loved the way he smiled. She loved the gleam of pride in his eyes when their children correctly answered the questions he posed during an impromptu suppertime tutoring session. She loved the small winks he gave when she fell into his gaze.

She hated, however, the refined way in which he ate pizza. Anna was not hungry after eating by her own estimations half the sweets she had over-purchased in panic, but she could not let this small act of weakness deter her from debate. She lifted the slice of Hawaiian from her plate and took a bite, commenting, her mouth half-filled with ham and pineapple, that _this_ was how Americans ate pizza. This, she jested, was the only acceptable way to consume carryout in the land of the free.  Edmund stared at her for what felt a rather long while without a hint of expression before continuing to cut his slice of pie, bringing the smallest morsel that his fork could carry to his lips.

“I fail to see how you can argue that total integration is the goal of a society which prides itself on being the product of people and cultures imported from abroad,” he replied.

“It is called a melting pot, Edmund,” Anna retorted, smiling when her daughter set her utensils aside. Halley looked hesitantly to her father. After receiving a light nod, she took her pizza by its crust.

“My Love,” Edmund grinned, cutting himself a paltry piece in his pretentious European fashion, “You realise that ‘fondue’ is eaten with tableware as well, or ought we to take another trip to Switzerland?”

“It depends,” Jeanne countered softly, looking up from the book Edmund had lent her for revision and the food she otherwise found uninteresting. “If you are only dipping bread you can use your hands. That is what we’ve always done at mine.”

“Thank you, Junior,” Anna smiled, patting the girl on the shoulder, backing when Jeanne casually explained that due to an incident at a company dinner party several months ago her mother had all but disallowed metal cutlery to be used when her father was at home.

“Christ. How did -” Edmund started –then surrendered, rubbing his temples declaring that he would prefer not to know how his sometimes-friend conducted himself in the corporate world. Anna had the same reaction and suddenly found herself wishing her fingertips were not covered in grease. Reading either her mind or her expression, her husband laughed.

“You have the coolest family, I swear,” Jordan said as he examined the knife and fork he held, a habit born from Edmund’s perhaps better influence. Owing either to his father’s extended sigh or his friend’s silent mimic of her father’s violent antics, he elected to continue using them.

“Bullocks,” Jeanne replied. “You do. Mine is fully unimaginative. My sisters and I were not nearly named after constellations.”

“You could have been named after the muses though.”

“We are five, not nine.”

“You would have been Calliope,” Jordan speculated, ignoring the numerical discrepancy.

At this, the girl’s pubescent bellicosity returned with sudden force. “The war one?” she spat. “When are you going to let this go? It’s not like I even hit Ashley that hard - she got up, didn’t she?” Though reasoned, the argument proved unconvincing to all present. Anna wondered just how many jokes had been made that afternoon at Jeanne’s expense; if they had been fuelled by fear or lust on her son’s part. He smiled, unrepentant.

“Epic poetry,” Edmund corrected, cringing slightly. “The wisest of the muses as well as the most ah … assertive. I would take it as a compliment.” Jeanne, however, crossed her arms as she continued to glare at Jordan, who, for his part, returned to eating his slice of pizza with an air of propriety Anna both envied and endeavoured to correct.

“Who would I be, Daddy?” Halley peeped.

“Tonight … Ourania,” Edmund declared with pride. “Astronomy.” Hearing this, she beamed bright as any star, as did her mother.

“And me?” Jordan asked.

“Judging by the content of your campaign posters I am torn between Clio and Thalia,” Anna answered dryly. Edmund nodded his concurrence, giving her a light and lazy grin. For a few seconds the stress of the evening was shattered by a shared memory of the long nights he had spent reading and rapping classical lyric at her request as she worked to close the bar. She remembered how they interacted when they both had been too shy to touch; when love was ‘ _eros_ ’ or ‘ _amor_ ’ and only spoken of in association with an ideal. Anna blew him a kiss from across the table. After fifteen years of marriage, it still manged to make his cheeks flush. Some things would never change. ‘Dork _,_ ’ Anna mouthed. “Gross,” both of her children said in unison.

“What would Jordan’s constellation name have been though, Dr Hewlett?”

Called back from anamnesis, he considered the query for a time. “Ah … Do you mean what I wanted to name him or what I’d elect to call him now?”

“I knew it!” Jordan said upon hearing evidence in support of his long asserted claim before allowing his father a chance to answer. “I bloody well knew it. Mum, why ever would you deny me this?”

“Where were you sixteen years ago to back me up?” Edmund chaffed.

“You would have had to spell it for everyone,” Anna defended. “Every day. Your entire life long. You would have corrected every mispronunciation until you surrendered yourself to your fate and began answering to ten or twelve different names. You should be thanking me.” She paused. “Anyway … you have never otherwise shown a great interest in stargazing. Why do you harp on this every chance you get?”

The moment her words met with air, Anna regretted having spoken them. Her son looked at through he had been slapped.

“That’s not true,” Jordan said, his voice suddenly small, reminding Anna that for all of his bravado, he was still a little boy who longed for his father’s approval. “It is just that Dad, Halley … never mind.” He sighed, defeated.

“What then?” Edmund blinked, his smile vanishing. Anna frowned at the resentment with which her daughter’s name was spoken. Her son traded in mischief and minor transgressions but turned to abstain from the attention she assumed he targeted, often deflecting it instead to his sister. She was beginning to fret that he truly believed his father to favour her.

Jordan looked down, dejected. “I don’t know,” he murmured in a manner that contradicted the negation. “You offered to take Halley to the planetarium with you at the weekend before it opens but not me. Not once.”

“That isn’t – you’ve been so often, I -” Edmund stammered in shock. Anna questioned just how long this wound had been left to fester. She recalled his tears after failing to construct his own solar system to his teacher’s criteria, something he now spoke of in esteem. Was it that he had imagined Edmund’s burst of anger over the incident to have been directed at him, or was theirs was universal in another sense? Anna pondered if simply nothing could be done for the strife that tended to occur between fathers and sons. She inhaled slowly. The night grew darker.

“Not since I was twelve,” Jordan retorted, interrupting. “And never when it was closed, just you and me.” Food and drink abruptly altered themselves to the bitter taste of his tone. Much like his father, when her son was unsettled his misery threatened to consume every mind it reached. Anna closed her eyes. She had to fix this somehow.

“Jordan -” she started.

“If you want -” Edmund began to offer.

“Nah, just do your thing with your favourite kid. Since apparently it is not my thing,” their son veered. “I’m grounded anyway.”

“How is any of that my fault?” Halley challenged.

“It’s not. I’m just not impressive.”

“Jordan! That is quite enough,” Edmund warned. Anna felt torn. She often did.

“He wasn’t copying, Mrs. Hewlett, Dr Hewlett. Not exactly,” Jeanne confessed, breaking the disquieting silence that followed her godfather’s outburst. She frowned; annoyed that she was being made to get her friend out of –as opposed to into -trouble. “We both have five APs and check one another’s work. Jordan is better in history and Latin and I am better at maths so we trade papers really just to improve our understanding. He only has a C because our grade is reduced right now to class participation and Jordan is basically never called on because I sit in front of him and Mr. Jaensch probably just doesn’t see his hand raised. Um. It is alphabetical. By first name. Otherwise we could switch.”

“Yeah. That and integrals,” Jordan muttered. He rose without asking to be excused. “I am going to go check on the cake,” he said when Anna asked him to sit back down.

“I set a timer!” Jeanne shouted after him.

 _“Still!”_ he called back before slamming the kitchen door.   

“Daddy, maybe you should talk to him,” Halley pleaded, an echo of her mother’s thoughts.

“I don’t know what to say,” Edmund admitted. “I never do.”

Anything, Anna thought, anything would be enough.

“He brags about you all the time, you know,” Jeanne continued, almost in chastisement. “Every time you give a TED Talk he will send us – and by us, I mean, of course, everyone in the entire school – a link to it which he’ll also makes randos watch or listen to on his phone during lunch and study hall. Every time Hayden has a speaker or a new exhibit, he finds a way to shove it into conversation.”

Anna couldn’t tell if Jeanne was speaking out of solidarity or concern, or if anything she said was completely true.

“He never wants to come,” Edmund lamented. “I had no idea, I suppose I just assumed, I …”

“Are you kidding? He wants to be you, Dr H.”

“Really?” Anna inquired sceptically. The night would be difficult enough to navigate with one of her boys muddled. She did not need them both in a mood. Not when they all still had a project to finish.

“He tells all my friends about Daddy’s job too,” Halley answered for her. “And sometimes he’ll draw me pictures and poke out holes where the stars should be to help me visualize what the ancients imagined.” She turned to her father and continued sweetly, “he says you used to do stuff like that before you were appointed to the directorship.”

“That’s … rather sweet of your brother,” Anna said, more to her husband than to the daughter she addressed.

Edmund bent his brow to his palms, burying his head in his hands.

“It is not like he doesn’t want to come. We just have a lot of homework,” Jeanne shrugged. “And Jordan is in every club on offer it feels like. I don’t know. I don’t even see him that much either outside of class anymore. He is just in a way right now; it has been like this for weeks. Over Kitty I guess.”

“Who?” Halley squinted.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Edmund said.

 

* * *

 

It had always been easier with his daughter. As a baby she loved the melody of his voice, as a girl she mirrored most of his interests. By contrast, when his son was born, the boy wept every time he tried to hold him, seeming to prefer the company and embrace of every other adult in his surroundings. To this day, the two barely touched. Edmund had grown up in an extremely rigid environment; he strongly suspected he had unintentionally lent some of his isolationist leanings to his son.

When he found him in the kitchen, in deep examination of batter still baking in the oven, he pulled him up into a hug, kissing the loose, dark curls atop his head. Jordan allowed it for a moment before - as was to be expected from adolescence - he pulled back, groaning his discontent.

“I don’t think I tell you enough how proud of you I am,” Edmund said.

“I don’t expect it,” Jordan blinked. “It isn’t like I am a Straight-A student anymore, or that I ever make it off the bench in any of the sports I supposedly play. Dad I’m sorry I, I know you must be angry … disappointed, or -”

“You are a good student, Jordan,” he tried to assure him.

“Halley is better.”

“That a false comparison if I have ever heard one. Halley is ten and she has an older brother who ensured that I get to geek out over her solar system project with the rest of the family.”

“Yea, more like freak out.”

Jordan smirked in response to Edmund boxing him on the arm in mock offence. When he looked his father in the eyes however, his smile faltered.

“I,” Edmund started. When he spoke to his son, he was wanting for words, imagining Jordan had no great use of anything he struggled to express. His child bit his long lower lip to stop it from quivering. “What?” he forced. Edmund saw himself in his son’s shame and fretted over what he must look like in his eyes.

He had no words.

He spoke.

“I know you are at an age where you are, that is I – ah, at any age … I’ve never really known what to say to you. You have so much more of your mother than you have of me, I don’t even know that I have any place to offer you guidance. You are so … effortlessly confident, you have so many friends – you know how to _be_ a good friend. A good brother and son. I was never any of those things until I fell into your mum’s influence, and still I seem to struggle. I suppose I always worry that I give you cause for embarrassment. That has - admittedly - far more to do with me than it does with you. I – I don’t want you to think, to ever think, that I don’t love you every bit as much as I love Halley. And I love you both so much. If I don’t show it enough, or if I don’t show it equally, I -”

“Dad, come on, it’s fine,” Jordan said, trying to brush him off.

“It’s _not_ fine,” Edmund insisted.

Jordan swallowed. “You really want to help me out with maths then?”

“Absolutely.” He knitted his brow, unsure what to make of the self-reproach that seeped through his son’s stooped stance. He wondered if he gave the impression of expecting too much, if he himself gave too little. He watched his child, worried that he too was caught in a long game of keeping up appearances for their own sake; if he too struggled to come back from small defeats.

“Here,” he offered reluctantly, indicating to an open book. “Tomorrow I have a B-day so you can -”

“Sit down.”

“What, now?”

Edmund looked down at Jordan’s unfinished homework strewn out across the small table. He quickly identified his easily mendable errors. Having previously taught and tutored in the subject while he had attended graduate school, he patiently corrected and explained how to rework formulae to solve for a specified unknown to his boy’s unspoken admiration until the kitchen timer beeped. Edmund continued his lecture after removing the cake from the oven, offering and eating a celebratory singe-wrapped chocolate for their success in not letting it burn - as he was certain his lovely wife would insist upon - until he was sure of their son’s understanding.

“Thanks. Really. Thank you,” Jordan said.

It sounded like an apology.

“You can always come to me, you know that don’t you?” Edmund urged, gently placing his hand over his son’s, surprised when he made no motion to remove it.

Jordan was silent for a long while as he stared down at the calculus homework he spent the last forty minutes redoing under his father’s supervision. “I – you think I’m embarrassed of you but I am embarrassed of myself. In front of you. Always. I can’t ask for help,” he confessed. “I know you’ve figured out by now that I’m not a genius or a prodigy like you are and I just-”

“Stop,” Edmund extended his index finger. “You are speaking of fallacies. Everything takes practice, and everyone, myself included, needs plenty of it. I am ever at your service.”

“Like this weekend then? And the next?” he asked hopefully.

“Certainly,” he paused. “Ah. Jordan … I’ll, I’ll have a word with your mum. I’ll help you to revise but – but you’re not grounded. I shouldn’t have been so quick to -”

“No, you were right to, I was a tit earlier; anyway it is probably for the best,” he sighed. “Two weeks. I need two weeks. I don’t want to go to Homecoming anymore anyway and since Jeanne was there when you issued your decree she might stop pestering me about asking Kitty.”

“Who is this Kitty?”

“Can we not do this?” Jordan blushed. “Really, I’d rather just solve random functions with you for two weeks straight than get into this mess. It is humiliating.”

“Ah … that serious, is it?” Edmund inquired, considering for the first time that it was not simply his nature, but rather the nature of young romance that lent itself to the sting of internalized humiliation. Having only heard the name twice, he saw himself in his son’s struggle.

“No it’s … it’s not at all. I barely even know her. She is a junior at my school, Jeanne only knows her because they are both on like three varsity teams together. They are friends, I guess. I mean,” he paused, his volume lowering. “Look if I tell you something, you have to promise you won’t repeat it. To anyone. Even Mum. Especially Mum. She wouldn’t understand.”

“I doubt that highly -”

“Please. She won’t understand this and frankly I’m not comfortable with her knowing.”

“Alright,” Edmund nodded. He had always assumed his children would seek their mother’s advice on these matters; that neither would consider him to have anything worthy to offer the subject. Though convinced that Jordan would have done better to have gone to Anna with questions of the heart, Edmund leaned in attentively. He gave an assuring smile, inviting him to continue.

The joy he felt at being invited into his son’s confidence was to be short lived.

“Last Monday during lunch,” Jordan relayed, “the lads and I were in the cafeteria talking about going to the library after school to revise for that AP Euro test we had on Friday, and Sam saw Junior and said we should invite her to come, too. And by ‘ _we_ ’ he meant ‘ _me_ ’ because I was staring at her … I guess. I told him that she was with the girls she knew from blood sport and that I didn’t want to disturb her. Um,” he paused. “She doesn’t sit with us anymore. Since term started.”

“That must be hard for you.”

“Yea … she saw me looking at her with her new friends so she came over to our table and asked if we wanted to come to theirs. My mates were thrilled at the prospect of dining –if it can be called that- with the upper class, but I … I couldn’t get up at that moment. You … you know what I mean, right?”

“Christ,” Edmund shared his son’s cringe. It was not something he would be keen to repeat to his wife even if he had not been sworn to secrecy.

“And of course Nate called attention to it and just immediately Jeanne started asking -and then insisting - that I thought Kitty was cute, which I mean she is – she is beautiful – but honestly I had forgotten she was even there. I just um. I had to pretend to have it bad for a girl I’ve never actually spoken to because I didn’t want the whole lunch block to know that I had a boner because of my best friend, who now thinks me a coward. I don’t know what to do. So it is just better if I’m grounded so I have a legitimate excuse to do nothing.”

‘Nothing’ was the option Edmund chastised himself, which he would be tempted to take in this situation as well. ‘Nothing’ was a coward’s response. He refused to sit back and watch his son follow the same pattern of personal shortcomings it had taken him so long to break.

“Tell her. Jeanne I mean,” he answered as though he imagined it simple.

“The most embarrassing story of my life?” Jordan frowned.

“Ah … there might be some parts I would omit,” Edmund tried to smile. It was not returned.

“Still, how can I?” his son lamented. “Things are already weird with us. I asked her to Homecoming today before school and she said I was being a coward for not asking Kitty instead and I – I am going to be honest, I don’t really know what to do with that rejection. I have never gone to a dance with anyone else and I don’t _want_ to go with anyone else and I can’t risk bringing this up again because I can’t find the right words and Junior is running out of diplomatic ways of telling me ‘ _it is never going to happen’_.”

Edmund related well enough that he knew without asking that these words had only ever been spoken in his boy’s head.

“Did I ever tell you how your mother and I started out?” he asked.

“Only a thousand times.”

“So no,” he smiled. “Alright. This may well surprise you - the first time I ever truly spoke to her, I asked her to marry me. Hear me on this one,” he stressed, “be direct.”

“Wait, what?” Jordan gaped. “I thought you went to the tavern at the weekend and then one day you were a man down so my godfather asked her if she would step in for your soccer team -”

“Language!” Edmund exclaimed. “What have I told you about using that word in this house?” he asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“Dad,” Jordan said flatly.

“Non-negotiable.”

“You know I don’t think ‘ _football_ ’ is a sport because you can play it after forty,” Jordan shook his head. Play, Edmund considered, was a stretch at this point. Twice a week for half an hour he ‘played’ indoor with a number of equally exhausted ex-pats he had known since moving to the colonies; men like him who failed to see the appeal of American sporting culture.

“Ah … you know the same can be said of baseball,” he countered, the ire he privately harboured towards the United States heightened. “Less running.”

“Really? Can you, Old Man?”

“Play baseball?” Edmund sneered, “Personally, I can’t even stand to watch it. Ah. Unless you are playing, of course.”

“I think there is little risk of that next season,” Jordan joked. He looked down at his petit frame either for emphasis or in a sudden bout of self-pity. All his friends seemed to have doubled in size over the summer; Jordan stood only to Jeanne’s shoulders, Sam and Nate had each packed on what looked twenty pounds in muscle whilst he remained slight and scrawny.

“You’ll grow out of it,” his father tried to assure him. “By the spring I’ll have to go back to being as bored by your sport as you are by mine.”

“I’d like going to the pub with you to watch the matches a _tad_ more if you’d let me join you in a drink,” Jordan attempted. So, his father thought, he was at that age too. This, he feared, could prove rather difficult.

“No. There would be no way we could sneak that past your mother in her own alehouse. She would see us both hang. Nice try through,” he answered, wondering when either of them had gotten quite so old.

“So what really happened then? Between you and Mum? Did you really ask her to marry you right off? I thought she asked you.”

“Ah, yes. I … well it is a little more complicated than that. You see - your mother and I, we had never really spoken before, at least, we had never had what one might describe as a pleasant conversation – owing, I suppose entirely to my nerves. By the time we had met, I’d seen half the world but never anyone half so lovely as her. My tongue was all but paralysed every time I found myself in her presence-”

“Oh God, Dad.”

“This criticism from the kid who gets excited watching a girl talk to other people?”

Jordan reddened. Edmund smirked. “I imagine that I loved your mother from the start. For two years before I gathered to courage to ask her for anything beyond a cider. I ought to have said something sooner.”

“What changed?”

“How to put this?  I found myself in a situation where I had waited too long to submit the paperwork for an extension on my student visa and she had just gotten divorced and needed to find housing. I had a flat, which turned out to be less than ideal - but that is neither here nor there  - so I … well I made a proposal -platonic, of course – which she was good enough to accept.”

“You married Mum for a Green Card?” Jordan choked. “Dad, what the actual fuck -”

“Language,” Edmund said, raising his finger again. “And no. I married your mother because I love her more than I can possibly put to words. As it were though, I suddenly found myself lost in a situation of my own making next to the girl of my dreams. Your mother was –and remains- simply exquisite. The envy of the entire town. I was nothing by comparison. Between you and me, I’m still not. I knew this even then but I was proud, determined not to show or own my multitude of shortcomings. Thus, I made matters worse on myself. I took her to a bookstore in an ill-fated attempt to impress her, made a complete arse of myself -”

“Language.”

“Fair,” Edmund smiled. He saw his son looking at him expectantly. “And she laughed. Your mum. She laughed and forced me to laugh at myself. Which is … fortunate, as I never quite grew out of my awkward phase.”

“Did you dress up like Galileo back then too?” Jordan smarted. Edmund was happy to see his jocundity return, even in the form of a joke made at his expense.

“In my defence your mother really likes that look,” Edmund retorted, mimicking umbrage. “Here is my point though. I had no idea what to say back then. No one does. There is no script. I was lost for words, so -fool that I am and have even been - I ended up talking about maths and mythology and by the grace of God I was able to suffice her just by being … well, myself. I imagine things working out for you in much the same fashion if you are daring enough, which I absolutely believe you to be.”

“How … _did_ they work out for you then? I mean – really, no offence, but, doesn’t really seem like you knew how to flirt either.”

“Oh. I didn’t and I don’t,” Edmund agreed. “I never needed to. The night we moved in together your mother told me she was falling in love with me and confessed her clandestine ambitions. I had absolutely no idea what to do with the first bit of that but I swore to her that I would provide for her happiness and set about doing so.”

“Oh God, Dad. No. Why?” he winced.

“Not – not like that. Not straight away.”

“Ew! Christ, that is not what I meant either. I just meant, you didn’t say _‘I love you, too’_?”

“It would have been easier,” Edmund sighed. “In the end it was all she wished to hear. But no. I didn’t trust myself to come out and say it. And that is precisely why I am advising you to be honest and direct. With Jeanne, with, well with everyone,” he stopped. Leaning in, he whispered a small amendment. “Unless your relationship is primarily corporate or political in nature, in which case subtly and systematically force your opponent into emotional and psychological sacrifices that serve to fortify your defences.”

“Damn,” Jordan, backed, sitting up a bit straighter. “I get why Mum begs you not to attend town halls or school board meetings.”

“I could have made it in politics had I become a citizen regardless of what she says,” Edmund claimed. “But to return to my main point, a few days later I told her I love her for all that she is. Simply put, that is the only truth that has ever been of any consequence. Yet I had to watch the rest of the world fall apart to find the courage to say it. You shouldn’t.” His son, he reasoned, was bound to encounter a myriad of problems inherent in dating and courtship, reservation should not find its place among them. Jordan’s face was a kaleidoscope of considerations. He wondered if it occurred to his son, as it suddenly did to him how very selfish he was being – how much less fun he and the girl’s father would have coming up with slights if they imagined they might scar.

“Fall apart?” Jordan asked. Edmund worried he had given him undo angst rather than ardour.

“It is a rather long story and one that is not entirely mine to tell,” he replied simply.

“Who else can I ask then?”

“No one. Not so long as we are all waiting out several Statutes.”

“Like, of Limitations? Christ, Dad. When were you ever cool?”

“Me?” Edmund laughed. “Never. Honestly, never, but I was brave enough to tell your mother how I feel. Next to that, the rest of it comes easy. And son, if you can get a school to crown you ‘Supreme Leader’ in a democratic system,” he commented with unconcealed respect, “I am sure you can tell Jeanne that you don’t just want to go to this dance of yours as friends.”

“How … how do you know that is what I said?” Jordan shrunk. Again, Edmund saw an unflattering picture of himself in his son, though one quite different from the authoritarian to whom he had been afraid to admit a misunderstanding of mathematics. In his mind, he laughed over the things which had formed Anna’s similar initial impressions, careful as he had otherwise been to command his appearance.

“Ask your mother sometime about how I tried to define ‘ _platonic_ ’ for her on our first date,” Edmund answered. “I don’t even know how to play it cool. You are already a step ahead of where I was at twice your age, at least when it comes to the ladies.”

“Oh, Dad. C’mon you didn’t,” Jordan, cachinnating into his palms in second-hand embarrassment.

“I did,” he assured him with a slight cringe. “And yet we found happiness in one another. Now, go back out there do what you have to do but send your mother and sister in here on your way so they can explain what we are meant to be doing with all of these sweets.”

“Eat them,” Anna said, smiling from the doorframe. Edmund wondered how long she and the girls had been standing there. He felt blood rush to his cheeks. “Eat your pizza however you want,” she continued, “but when you make a model solar system in this beautiful country of ours I’m sorry but I have to insist that you make more of an effort to integrate.”

Yours, Anna, Edmund thought. His family was his home but his land would always be an island in the Atlantic.

Jordan held up the two wrappers Lindt pralines they had eaten after taking the cake from the oven for his mother’s approval.

“That simply won’t do,” Anna scolded playfully, her hands at her hips. She winked at Edmund, relieved as he was that he and his son had found grounds on which to mend.

“My Love, I shall ‘integrate’ science into our daughter’s life if we all succumb to a sugar overdose to meet that end,” he replied as he scooped a smiling Halley up onto his lap.

“What do you need to do then?” Jeanne asked Jordan.

“I, uh. Dad wants me to get a blow torch from the garage to melt sugar so that we can throw candies in as it cools to make an asteroid belt.”

Edmund and Anna both cleared their throats simultaneously; Edmund, hoping his advice had not gone ignored, Anna, in concern over what her son had just proposed.

“Want to help me look?” Jordan asked Jeanne at the same time Anna demanded of her husband, “Why do we have a blow torch?”

“Grade school projects,” Jordan answered, nodding at his father.

“Weeds,” Edmund clarified. “I assure you it is perfectly -”

“Weeds? You know what you can do with dandelions?” Anna narrowed her gaze.

“Make a crown,” Halley offered. Edmund slid her from his lap so that he might stand to meet his wife’s challenge.

“Make a wish when they grow old and their petals white. Not you know … kill them with fire whilst they are still budding.”

“I’m old, my hair white. Make a wish, Anna.”

She approached, smiling at him seductively. In a sultry voice she said, “I wish you could do science with the children without inviting the possibility for injury.”

“Would you settle for a kiss?” he offered, leaning in.

“From you?” she asked before echoing her children’s chorus of ‘ _ew_ ’. Edmund took his chance with her parted lips.

“Gross, there are children present,” Jordan chimed.

“Don’t tell me that in addition to teaching Pluto as a planet the science curriculum has failed to inform you how these so-said children came into being.”

“You think for all the kissing you do I would have a sister by now,” Halley scoffed. Anna closed her eyes. It wasn’t that they had not tried.

“You don’t want a sister. Trust and believe,” Jeanne pouted.

“Betting that John tries to assure Mary every time he is ‘ _all the protection they need’_ ,” Edmund whispered into his wife’s ear, causing her to laugh and fall further into him embrace, losing her balance as she tried to hit him for ‘being inappropriate’. He hugged her tighter.

“I love you so much,” she said.

“And I you much more than that.”

“And,” she whisper again, ever lighter, _“your mate is going to murder you one of these days if you keep saying things like that in earshot of his girls.”_

 _“Ah. Yes well, if I played my hand as I expect, you have no idea how soon.”_ At this, Anna glanced at the set of sophomores standing awkwardly in the doorway and turned back to Edmund with raised eyebrows.

_“Don’t worry, Love. He is as much of a dork as I. This all ultimately came out of a discussion on integrals.”_

_“I’m sure.”_

 

* * *

 

When the teens returned half an hour later with a blow torch and a fire extinguisher, offering the explanation that they had gone outside to test it for their messy curls and clothes, Anna consented that there were worse things he teenage son could to with his spare time than snog. The two built the belt for Halley under Anna’s supervision, while Edmund explained to his daughter how Jupiter’s gravitation stops meteors from pumping the earth. Alternating between eating M&Ms and sticking them onto the ends of toothpicks at her insistence, he told Halley the names every moon in their solar system, explained the stories that defined their nomenclature to the child’s absolute delight. Halley began taking notes of everything he said - her brother stepping in to cover icing with coloured sugar and sprinkles, occasionally interrupting with questions of his own, which, he insisted, were only designed to assist him in completing his ‘masterpiece’.

Anna smiled.

She found herself lost in the memory of the first time she had ever gone stargazing with her husband. He had explained all of what he now offered the children with an excitement she saw had been unsullied by time. Reflecting on their date long ago, when he first spoken all of this for her ears, not once had his gaze left her for the heavens. It was then she realised she would only ever have eyes for him. Every glance, every giggle, every gentle graze of her hand told her that Edmund was caught in the same distant memory. That part of him always would be. Part of her, she realised, would be left in the moment they were now living – watching the two children marvel with their father, her husband discussing his passions with the people he loved the most.

An hour later, when their family solar system was more complete than any other she had ever seen, when Halley could name every praline as the satellite it was meant to represent, when Edmund seemed content that he had personally satisfied what he considered ought to constitute a basic curriculum, Anna declared it to be perfect. “Like you,” she said, kissing her daughter. “And you,” she said to her son. “And even you,” she said as her husband squeezed her.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t believe that you wound up being the cool parent,” she said as her husband climbed into bed after brushing his teeth, twenty minutes after she retired for the night.

“What are you talking about?” Edmund clamoured as he crawled towards her. You, mayor of New York’s hippest suburb, own the only bar in town with a sport package. You, my dear, are the ‘cool’ one by default. I’m a nerd who got lucky.”

“Sometimes I think I am too strict,” Anna confessed, cuddling up to him.

“They are both at an age where you have to battle for their hearts and minds,” Edmund said. “They want authority if only to seem as if they are rebelling against it. I don’t know what I, or rather we, would do without you.”

“I do,” Anna smiled. “You would keep them up all night naming every star in the sky.”

“Practically. Speaking of...” he started hopefully before petering off.

“Hm?” Anna hummed in austere.

“I want to go camping one night when we visit Scotland next month, a break with you and the kids from the rest of my family,” her husband pleaded.

“Edmund, you _hate_ camping.”

“I hate insects,” he countered. “Less of a problem in the north. In October.”

“You hate the cold! I hate the cold,” Anna protested against his coos of “ _I’ll keep you warm_.”

“Bullshit,” Anna said, hitting her husband lightly with the paperback she had been reading, displacing his glasses. “You always steal all the blankets. Every night. No.” She extended her tongue. He took is as an invitation to graze it with his own.

“We will bring more,” Edmund promised in between planting kisses at the nape of her neck. “Come now,” he said softly. “I already pitched it to Halley and she is thrilled about the prospect of seeing the sky unpolluted by electric waste.”

“And Jordan?”

“Ah - In the midst of texting his new girlfriend and live-blogging NBC’s Town Hall debate, I got an uncommitted _‘yeah, whatever’_ which I am taking as a yes,” he grinned. Anna laughed at herself, wondering when it had become so easy to win her over. “Should I remind you what happened the last time you thought to pitch a tent in the snow?” she cautioned, despite knowing that she had already consented defeat in the form of a smile.

“We can build a fire,” Edmund continued as he pulled her on top on him, “make s’mores. You can -”

“No to the s’mores. I shan’t ever think of sweets again after tonight.”

“Really?” Edmund blinked. “I had fun.”

“Good,” Anna teased. “That is the point of projects like these.”

“That is always the point of astronomy, my dear.”

“Every blanket in the castle,” Anna insisted, tossing the one that covered them aside. “And everyone wears long underwear and two pairs of warm socks.”

“How would we ever survive without you?”  

Though meant with affection, the words stung. Halley had been a tiny ball of stress before her father had uprooted the worries she had planted simply by the persuasion of his presence. Jordan had been wound up in his own way before Edmund reassured him of his worth. Anna shook her head, “I kill the fun. The kids were miserable when it was just me and them.”

“I think that owes itself to the fact that everyone was hungry and I brought home pizza. As for the fun, you invent it. I quite enjoyed myself tonight. Building the American model … ah, even if it is not to scale. It was sweet,” he whispered, running his long fingers around a strand of hair that had fallen out of her messy bun. “Like you, my love. And frankly I have half a mind to committing us both to building another in oh, say, ten years.” He slid the thin straps of her silken nightgown from her shoulders. Anna felt him stiffen beneath her as his breath escaped him in admiration of her exposed breasts. “If you’re also up to it, that is.”

“We’ll see,” she winked.

Five weeks later, Anna would again find herself outnumbered, arguing with her husband and children about unpronounceable names of mythological origin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Comments and Kudos are always appreciated. 
> 
> XOXO - Tav

**Author's Note:**

> I did not intend for this to be a WIP but Leipzig drew this afternoon meaning Bayern could win the Bundesliga today. Either way, I’ll be far too plastered to pretend to speak English for the rest of the weekend. Cheers.
> 
> Comments and Kudos are always appreciated.  
> XOXO - Tav
> 
> Up Next: Edmund, predictably, gets over involved. It works out though.


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